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New Horizon Spacecraft Awakens




New Horizons Spacecraft
New Horizons Spacecraft out of Hibernation mode

Speeding through the outer space of our Solar system, New Horizons spacecraft has awakened after its five and half months of hibernation, ready for its second act after its 2015 flyby of Pluto. This spacecraft is 3.8 billion light years away from Earth and has been sending photographs and information about our beloved planet, Pluto.

New horizons woke up with the on-board timer late Monday, but the radio signals confirms that it took six hours to reach the  Earth that the New horizon has emerged, hence completing journey  at light speed  at 2.12am  EDT, Tuesday.

Alice Bowman, the New Horizons operation manager confirmed that the spacecraft has been functioning normally and efficiently. Back in 2015, the spacecraft had sent stunning images of the Pluto surface like vast mountain ranges, cryovolcanoes, glaciers, methane snow and other surprising geographic activity.

New Horizons is now on a new, extended mission with new destination sights. The ground controls ordered the hibernation of 165 days on December 21 to save fuel. It also gave scientists time to decide New Horizons next location.

Over the next two months, ground controllers will uplink commands to New Horizons to prepare the craft for a Jan. 1 encounter with an unexplored object in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of miniature worlds orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. The object, officially named 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule, was discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Scientists estimate the object is about the size of a large city, and it appears reddish, but even the most powerful telescopes at Earth are not capable of resolving any details about the New Horizons mission’s next target.

Scientists believe that Ultima Thule has been in the same state i.e. primordial state since Solar System's early state. It means it is in the same state from 4.5 billion years ago. Comets have originated from same frozen, faint environment but due to repeated passes near the Sun, it ancient original characteristics have faded away. 

Any discovery always helps us to understand new things. In the similar way, the discovery of Ultima Thule will help us to understand the formation and evolution of our Solar System.

Astronomers observing Ultima Thule from the ground using the object's occultation of stars has concluded that this system has elongated shape and may consist of two-three separate components, including a small moonlet orbiting nearby.

Ultima Thule's diminutive size and New Horizon's fast closing speed, will keep the probe's primary camera from resolving its shape and number of objects there.

As of Tuesday, New Horizons was approximately  162 million miles from Ultima Thule-which is located a billion miles away from  Pluto and travelling  760,200 miles closer each day. Soon we'll know more about this mysterious miniature world. 

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